LoveMusik - World Premiere Recording

It was by reading Speak Low, the correspondence of the composer Kurt Weill and his performer wife Lotte Lenya, that the producer-director Harold Prince got the idea that there was a stage work lurking in their lives, loves and letters. What kind? A musical, of course. And so with the playwright Alfred Uhry as bookwriter, later joined by orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, choreographer Patricia Birch, set designer Beowulf Boritt, costume designer Judith Dolan and lighting designer Howell Binkley, the musical LoveMusik was born.

I saw it three times, and have come to think that it was very likely the best musical I have ever seen. Why then did it not have much of a Broadway run? It was simply, as the phrase has it, too good for the ordinary man. If you were lucky enough to catch it, you can relive old memories with the newly released original cast recording. If you were not, you can at least derive from it a pretty good idea of what you missed.

LoveMusik ingeniously builds the Weill-Lenya story around 27 Weill compositions from all kinds of sources that, conjoined, become the kernel of an enthralling—musically, dramatically and humanly absorbing—tale. For this it also benefited from Prince's canny direction, and a perfect cast, which it got in Michael Cerveris as Weill, Donna Murphy as Lenya and David Pittu as Bertolt Brecht (no better hero, heroine and heavy anywhere) and in the superb support of John Scherer, Judith Blazer, Herndon Lackey, Erik Liberman, Ann Morrison, Graham Rowat and Rachel Ulanet.

Much of this magnificence makes it to the disc, with the booklet providing a smart synopsis by Josh Holloway and an ample, elegant and fascinating program note by Marty Bell, one of the co-producers with the Manhattan Theatre Club. Also included are vivid photographs of the production, of the real Weill and Lenya and of their re-creators (impersonators would be too weak a word) on the stage.

[IMG:R]What a dream cast they were! For starters, I am tempted to say that Cerveris, Murphy and Pittu looked and sounded almost more like those they portrayed than they themselves did. They were the essence of that trio—the Platonic idea of them, and also our idea, insofar as we had one. I speak as someone lovingly familiar with their voices from recordings, and with Lotte Lenya also from having seen her on stage and known her off. (You, too, may have caught her onstage in Cabaret and on screen, however villainously, in From Russia with Love.)

So hear and rejoice in, along with neat bits of dialogue, these great musical numbers, made perhaps even greater by the added weight of biography, and sovereignly conveying an idiosyncratic, yet in many ways also universal, love story—from tremendous, through troubled, to triumphant, albeit in a somewhat particular but still persuasive fashion. You cannot help already knowing "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" (though perhaps not in its original, and best, version), and possibly some others; but most of what you will discover here is just as fine or even better.

The songs—European at first but, with the Weills coming to the U.S.A., rather more American—are always uniquely Weill. Hungarian has a wonderful adjective English lacks, fulbemaszo, meaning creeping-into-the-ear, which is what a Weill song is. Having a dozen of the finest imaginable lyricists doesn't hurt either. They are Maxwell Anderson, Bertolt Brecht, Howard Dietz, Roger Fernay, Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner, Maurice Magre, Ogden Nash, Elmer Rice and Weill himself.

Once the 27 songs of this CD have crept into your ear—and, beyond that, into your memory—they'll never quite leave you. Nor, indeed, would you want them to.